SOURCE: "Narratives of a Virgin's Violation: The Critique of Middle-Class Reformism in Djuna Barnes's Ryder," in Novel, Vol. 30, No. 2, Winter, 1997, pp. 218-36.

[In the following essay, Edmunds asserts in a discussion of Barnes's Ryder, that "Barnes makes repeated, figurative use of the narrative of a virgin's violation to foreground the ultimate complicity between middle-class reformers and the structures of oppression they would reform, while eschewing the scandalous appeal to fact on which such projects depend."]

In her first novel, Ryder (1928), Djuna Barnes recasts her own family history as the story of the freewheeling Ryder family, whose outrageous actions at once parody and overturn the conventions of middle-class domestic fiction. Embracing the maverick ideals of polygamy, idleness, and freethinking, the Ryders not only fail to exemplify dominant norms of domestic conduct; they actively dispute the social mandate to uphold such norms. This dispute largely takes place in rural New York during the period between 1890 and 1910. As I will argue in some detail, it takes form as a complex battle over the legacy of middle-class reformism. Wendell Ryder and his mother Sophia defend a long-standing reformist tradition of social experimentation in the face of contemporary reformist efforts to bring their domestic practices under the rule of the wage economy and the welfare state. In this battle between reformers, no party emerges unsullied. Instead, Barnes uses the action of the novel to call the whole project of middle-class reformism into question.

In reading the novel as a satire on the checkered history of middle-class reformism, this essay both engages and disrupts existing trends in the critical reception of Ryder and Barnes criticism more generally. Critics have long regarded Ryder as a protest novel, though there is significant disagreement as to what, exactly, the novel is protesting against. Cheryl J. Plumb sums up one position in characterizing the novel as "a protest against a repressive middle-class ethic" of conformity (86).¹ Anne B. Dalton, on the other hand, contributes to a growing body of Barnes criticism in her reading of the novel as an encoded incest narrative written in protest against Barnes's own early history of sexual abuse.² Taken together, these readings pose a contradiction which my own argument seeks to historicize: in one, Wendell Ryder stands as an emancipatory hero of nonconformity, while in the other, he stands as a domestic and sexual predator whose practices merit suppression.

The metamorphosing impulse to read Ryder as a protest novel has gone hand in hand with an insistence on the novel's basis in autobiographical fact. Indeed, feminist analyses of the incest theme in Barnes's work must posit a proliferating series of connections between her autobiography and her art as the necessary ground for their own critical project of sociopolitical protest and reform. Yet here again, scholars disagree about where and how to locate the factual in a highly mannered work of fiction. Phillip Herring detects autobiographical fact everywhere at the surface of Barnes's first novel and consequently "take[s] the liberty of drawing on Ryder for biographical information" not available elsewhere (Djuna 1, 313 n2).³ In contrast, Dalton proposes that in Ryder Barnes buries the most significant autobiographical events—and her protest against them—in cryptic metaphorical passages which the critic must unearth and translate back into fact (Dalton, "Escaping" 163-67).

No historical approach to Barnes's novel can divest itself entirely of a faith in historical fact. But in shifting the frame of reference from biography to social history, my reading of Ryder reopens the question of the relation between fact and figure which previous critics have closed rather quickly. I propose that the defining events of the Ryder family history participate in and comment critically upon wider sociopolitical discourses associated with the history of middle-class reformism, and that they do so in ways that exceed and destabilize the strict status of autobiographical fact currently assigned to the novel's contents. The "facts" of the plot—in particular, the shadowy fact of a young girl's sexual violation—take on symbolic and figural functions which help to define and organize the critique of middle-class reformism which the novel presents. Reversing the move to read from the fictive and figural to the factual, I track the shifting and/or multiplying targets of the novel's protest in the unstable play of its figurations; through the patterning of such play, Barnes mobilizes the uncertain details of a particular family history to call society at large to account.

Barnes is able to use the story of the Ryder family in this way because she positions its antinormative domestic project at the intersection of a number of wider sociohistorical struggles. As Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot persuasively demonstrate, the family has served as a crucial site of social struggle and social control throughout the modern period. Foucault argues that the family becomes "the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal" with the rise of the modern state (216). In turn, Donzelot has worked out for the French case the process by which the state came to present the middle-class family with a choice: it could preserve its "autonomy through the observance of norms that guarantee … social usefulness" or "become an object of surveillance and disciplinary measures in its own right" (91-92, 85). A similar process was well underway in the United States by the 1890s. This process was furthered, but also significantly complicated, by a strong and heterogeneous tradition of social experimentation and moral crusading on the part of private citizens. For as Barnes dramatizes quite vividly, the U.S. reformist tradition generated a number of competing models of what could and should constitute normative domestic and social conduct.

Ryder stages the competition between divergent models of normative conduct by condensing diffuse and long-ranging sociohistorical struggles into a series of direct and densely symbolic confrontations between representative individuals. Through such acts of condensation, the unorthodox homelife of the Ryder family comes to stand as the site at which old and new reformist philosophies vie for the authority to determine social norms. Throughout the novel, powerful representatives of capital and the state attempt to expose the Ryders' domestic activity as a set of secret and deviant practices in scandalous need of reform. But Wendell and Sophia successfully combat this threat to their autonomy by turning the same charges against their attackers. They parodically invoke the reformist philosophies of an earlier era in order to refigure their antinormative domestic practices as alternative and even superior models of normality. And they use these earlier philosophies to demonstrate that it is not they, but their attackers, whose secret misconduct should be exposed and disciplined.

Barnes performs a further act of condensation on her materials by making the narrative of a virgin's violation central to each of the struggles staged between rival reformers. The narrative of violation serves a dual figurative function in these episodes. On the one hand, sexual violation serves as a figure for the reformer's act of penetrating and scandalizing the secret of another person's purported misconduct. On the other hand, sexual violation serves as a figure for the deviant and/or wrongful contents of the secret itself. In this way, Barnes locates a disturbing symmetry at the heart of her critique, whereby the targets and the agents of social reform are assigned an equal power to abuse. The mirroring relation thus established is further evidenced in the structure of the struggles staged in the novel, in which reformers vie to reform one another, if only to elude reform themselves.

In this essay, I examine four episodes in which the narrative of a virgin's violation figures decisively in the action of the larger plot. In the first three episodes I consider, the dramatic question of whether a virgin has been or will be violated is linked to local skirmishes in the more general historical struggle between old and new philosophies of reform. Thus, a major part of my purpose in considering these episodes will be to analyze their complex historical resonances. As I indicate above, my further purpose lies in demonstrating the distinctly figurative uses to which Barnes puts the narrative of sexual violation in these scenes. This demonstration provides a necessary context for evaluating the more ambiguous and troubling relationship between fact and figure posed by the fourth episode I consider. In this last episode, Wendell Ryder's eldest daughter, Julie, has a cryptic dream of violation in which her father stands obscurely accused.

Here, I take issue with a feminist-psychoanalytic method of reading, most fully developed by Dalton, which refers the encoded contents of Julie's dream to postulated incidents of abuse which Barnes suffered at her own father's hands.⁴ In contesting this reading. I do not dispute the substantial evidence which suggests that Barnes was sexually abused in childhood and/or adolescence (perhaps by her father, almost certainly with his consent), and that she labored to give representation to such abuse in her art. My objections lie elsewhere. In its confident appeal to fact, such a reading discloses a scandalous autobiographical truth lurking inside all the secrets which characters negotiate throughout the novel. But this shocking act of disclosure reproduces a long-standing reformist strategy which the novel examines only to reject. Furthermore, it shuts down the figural play of meaning through which the novel's narratives of violation indict the very project of middle-class reformism.

Barnes's indictment of middle-class reformers complicates, although it need not invalidate, a feminist evaluation of her work. Rather, it might induce us to inspect more closely the assumptions and aims of our own critical project. Much of the interest and the challenge that Ryder poses to its feminist readers. I would argue, lies in its historically acute analyses of reformers' vexed implication in the oppressive structures they would reform. Resisting appropriation as a text that proleptically affirms the reform agendas of contemporary academic feminists. Ryder engages its readers in an unsettling and open-ended process of social and self-critique that refuses univocal positions and clearly charted political solutions. If the severity of this refusal makes Barnes a poor champion of liberal and/or radical social causes (feminist or otherwise), it also makes her a provocative interlocutor in an ongoing conversation about the envisioned ends and unenvisioned consequences of organized social change.

Sophia's Nothing

As Barnes's narrator points out early in the novel, the reformist spirit of New England runs in the Ryder's very blood. Sophia Ryder is a descendent of "a great and a humorous stock" of "the early Puritan," and she has "in her the stuff of a great reformer or a noisy bailiff" (Ryder, 9). Like Barnes's grandmother, Zadel Barnes, on whom she is closely modeled. Sophia divides her time between an eclectic assortment of utopian ventures, radical causes, and reform efforts: during her years in London, she moves "among the Pre-Raphaelites" and befriends Oscar Wilde (34, 18); in the States, she writes "manly editorials for the Springfield Republican" and accompanies Elizabeth Cady Stanton on her public speaking tours (154, 18).⁵ But Sophia manifests her greatest commitment to the cause of reform in her unstinting support for her son's "noble philosophy in the home" (168).

This philosophy has several components. First, there is the commitment to polygamy and free love, which leads Wendell to take a second wife, Kate-Careless, upon returning to the States with his British bride, Amelia. After the two women reluctantly set up housekeeping together on the family's Long Island farm, Bulls'-Ease, Wendell busies himself seducing as many more women as wit and circumstance permit. Second, there is the commitment to freethinking, which leads Wendell and Sophia to educate his many children at home. Finally, there is the commitment to idleness. Disenchanted with his brief, youthful employment as "a drug-clerk," Wendell vows "never, never again to battle as a self-supporting unit!" (18). As a result, the family does its best to survive outside the wage economy. What Wendell's wives cannot produce through subsistence farming, Sophia procures on lucrative begging trips to the city.

Sophia keeps "her family from ruin" through an ingenious writing scheme which she conducts on the sly. She addresses "hundreds" of heartbreaking appeals to wealthy capitalists and statesmen, and then drops by in person, disguised as an old beggar woman, to collect their alms. "[A] mendicant of the most persistent temerity," she has thus "lied and wept and played the sweet old woman to the partial undoing of every rich man in the country, and of one of the Presidents of the States" (14). On the whole, her scheme works very well. But when she tries it out on a magnate named Boots, he fights back. Correctly suspecting that she's only pretending to be poor, he prepares to lift up the skirts of her beggar costume to reveal the layers of expensive petticoats beneath. It is at this point that Sophia invokes the narrative of a virgin's violation, both to protect her own ruse from scandalous exposure and to discredit the motives of the man who assaults her.

Sophia's begging act and the crisis to which it gives rise comment satirically on the long and divided history of the social benevolence movement in the United States. In the showdown between Sophia and Boots, rival philosophies of relief work vie for authority. Sophia parodically revives mid-nineteenth century scripts of charitable giving associated with the sentimental cult of domesticity, while Boots works from a later cultural script in which social and moral supervision of the poor takes precedence over the distribution of alms. The condensations at work in their encounter are multiple and will take some unraveling.

In the antebellum period of Sophia's youth, the sentimental cult of domesticity provided middle-class women with the rationale for their escalating participation in all the philanthropic reform movements of the day. During these years, women's benevolent work was rhetorically equated with housework; divinely appointed to set God's house in order, women reformers sought to reconstruct society on the Christian principles of love and charity (Ginzberg 5, 59-60). Like other reform-minded women of her day. Sophia models her conduct on sentimental ideals, though usually to grotesque effect. For instance, in her first act as a young married woman, she lays down "the foundations … of relief" which will define her role throughout the novel. These foundations turn out to be a set of "five fine chamber-pots," which spell out in succession: "Needs there are many, / Comforts are few, / Do what you will / Tis no more than I do / … Amen" (11). As the rhyme suggests, Sophia founds her domestic order on "a passionate and precarious love of family" and a healthy tolerance for the natural man (16).

Decades later, Sophia comes to her family's rescue with the bold decision to recruit the nation's richest men into her domestic order in the capacity of loyal sons. To this end, she deploys the sentimental script of virtuous maternity to deliver an appeal that only a brute could resist. Her letters of beggary master all the tear-jerking conventions of sentimental fiction, "and always, with unerring faithfulness to her original discovery of the way to the heart of man, they were signed 'Mother'" (15). In these letters, sentimental altruism serves as a cover for Sophia's actual motives of self-gain in much the same way that her beggar costume serves as a cover for her expensive petticoats: both the letters and the costume reach back to dominant discursive strategies of her youth in order to cast a thin normative sheen over her decidedly antinormative plan to preserve her family in idleness. As Boots's assault will demonstrate, neither cover is impenetrable. Yet Sophia is able to maintain the upper hand in her encounters with her wealthy "sons" because the sentimental script of benevolence has come to serve their interests as much as it serves her own.

This point becomes clear when we examine the shift in the history of the social benevolence movement which takes place after the Civil War. During the 1870s and 1880s, the movement underwent reorganization, strengthening its recently forged ties with the state as well as its widely recognized ties with corporate capitalism. These alliances gave rise to arguments favoring fewer handouts and greater surveillance of the poor, who were newly suspected of faking their distress.⁶ Nevertheless, the sentimental script of benevolent self-sacrifice continued to legitimate the activities of reformers and capitalists alike, allowing the wealthy to recast their own schemes for personal gain as loving service to the public good.⁷

In posing literal, blood relations between the sentimental fiction writer and the corporate capitalist. Sophia's letters of beggary circulate a fiction of virtuous maternity that cuts both ways: it is impossible for her unlucky "sons" to expose the fraudulence and dishonesty of her investment in such a fiction without simultaneously exposing their own. This is the bind in which Boots finds himself when Sophia enters his corporate "sanctum" "to sweep up her gains" (176, 15). Given the nature of her advantage, the episode is best read not as an errand of charity but as the delicate encounter between a blackmailer and her victim.

Ranked by his twelve "disciples" in an enterprise which uneasily conflates the Gospel of Christ with the Gospel of Wealth, Boots confronts a woman whose business sense and religious piety match his own. Sophia opens her petition by offering Boots a vacuous, if vaguely menacing, sentimental blessing: "there is a world without end, and I fully believe in it. And what is there in that world for you, my dear, what shall I promise you?" (177). The very emptiness of the gesture suggests that Sophia here offers Boots a mother's blessing not to provide him with any practical benefit which he would otherwise lack, but to threaten him with the disaster that would ensue should such a blessing be withdrawn. In effect, she proposes that if Boots and his ilk want to insure her anonymous assent to the transparently false sentimental script of the capitalist's and the statesman's filial piety and benevolence, they will have to pay for it—up front and in person.

Boots responds, somewhat rashly, by attempting to deploy the more recent philanthropic script which casts the poor as undeserving impostors. When his twelve disciples recommend that he "toss" Sophia "from wall to wall, and from the midst of her nefarious skirts you'll hear the mother cry," Boots agrees:

An there be a battle and no old woman found among her clothes, connivance and no mother look.—for even praying you can tell the mother bottom.—why, we will set her out at the gate, that the citizens may witness so heinous a thing! I am all charity an the supplicant be truly tattered to the skin and the skin well parched, but whole cloth estranges me, as a patch of well-fed stomach throws me off scent! (178)

As Boots detects, the "double set of real Irish linens" which Sophia wears under her "pauper's cloak" gives the lie to her posture of indigence (177, 15). yet when he and his men finally resolve "to try her," Sophia is able to exploit the proposed scenario of her own exposure for its unsuspected power to reestablish her dissembling body as newly, if grotesquely, truthful. Should her body be turned upside down and inside out before the citizens "out at the gate," her bottom would back up her face as a portrait of helpless and deserving poverty. Thus, Sophia supplies her genital lack, which must also come to view in any attempt to "tell the mother bottom," as the culturally indisputable sign of a motherly "need" and "nothing else." "This is the hour when men seek a girl among your skirts!" she cries out in conference with herself, before addressing Boots:

Why, find her then, catch her on the flicker, for she asks forever only help, and reeks of that condition. Tear her into pieces adequate for the glutting of your suspicion, and every rag will speak the selfsame story, for there's nothing else about. (178)

Unable to expose Sophia's worldly all without also revealing her sexual "nothing," Boots and his men find themselves trapped by appearances if not by intent in the scandalous scenario of gang-rape implied by their desire to try her. When Sophia calls out in warning to "the girl" among her skirts, she invokes the narrative of a virgin's violation to refigure the meaning of Boots's proposed investigation in two ways. The reformist project to expose a pauper as a fraud reappears as the criminal project to rob an honest woman of her virtue. At the same time, the crime of rape serves as an all too fitting figure for the rapacious greed at work beneath capitalists' own show of benevolence and warm family feeling. In this way, Sophia uses the narrative of a virgin's violation to deflect the threat of scandal away from her family's antinormative scheme to live off the labor of others, and onto corporate capitalism's all too acceptable scheme to do exactly the same thing.

The ultimate success of Sophia's venture in this scene lies in her ability to seize the power of publicity from her would-be attackers. For while it would cost Boots very little to violate the girl among her skirts in the privacy of his office sanctum, coverage of the event in the contemporary sensationalist press would cost him a lot.⁸ The implicit threat of exposure through newspaper coverage is, in the end, what structures the chiastic doubling of safely kept secrets in this scene, insuring that neither party will tell on the other. Once again, the "nothing" of Sophia's genitals embodies the terms of their pact, standing as the grotesque bodily emblem of a self-serving hollowness at the center of both their investments in the sentimental script of benevolence. For Sophia such hollowness proves to be the key to her gain, for it unlocks the purse of corporate charity without opening her family to the intrusions of public surveillance. But for Boots such hollowness is only emasculating. As he extracts from his "left trouser pocket" "a bill of no mean proportions," Sophia exclaims,

Who is pauper here now? Not I, though I've been, so the two conditions have buzzed within the hour. I bring you, Boots, my most dear, many things therefore. Farewell, then, and cry, "Mother, mother, mother!" for it is a word that comes up to me ever. (178-79)

Wendell's All

Sophia's funds, procured like so much in the Ryders' lives through a love of family, allow her son Wendell to throw body and soul into his philosophy, unhampered by the petty routines of wage-earning. The scope of his leisurely endeavors is considerable, for, as Anne Dalton remarks, Wendell "imagines himself to be the new Adam and casts himself as artist, social iconoclast, and prophet and founder of a new religion" ("Escaping" 166). In this, he too stands as the direct descendent of several mid-nineteenth-century social reformers and social philosophers. The tenets of his philosophy perhaps stand closest to those of the Transcendentalists. Wendell shows more sympathy for Thoreau's aversion to labor than for Emerson's endorsement of industry and ambition, and he rejects both men's valorization of self-reliance. But he amply shares their regard for nature, their impatience with the shackles of social custom, and their high hopes for the world-transformative power of original genius. Where both Emerson's and Thoreau's enthusiasm for the natural man carefully skates above a condoning of his baser impulses, Wendell's regard for nature embraces all that is low in man and beast alike. In this sense, Wendell's philosophy can be read as a grotesque parody of Transcendentalism, one which both degrades and revives its loftier sentiments (see Bakhtin 21).

"He is nature in its other shape," confides his wife Amelia, who thinks him "great oftener than anything else"; "[h]e is a deed that must be committed" (241). His mother agrees, telling Wendell, "[Y]ou are nature, all of you, all of you, and nature is terrible when law hunts it down" (238). "The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature," Emerson says, and repeats: "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature." "There are no fixtures in nature," he proposes further. "The only sin is limitation" (Emerson 70, 262, 403, 406).⁹ To his mother Wendell explains, "I sport a changing countenance. I am all things to all men, and all women's woman" (164). And to one of many lovers, he confides, "I, my love, am to be Father of All Things." With this latter declaration, he announces his intention to give rise to a "Race" of Ryders which will encompass the earth in its human variety, "though never one" shall be "bourgeois or like to other men as we now know them" (210).

Blending sex and religion in his visionary ideas of a world to come. Wendell moves away from Emerson and Thoreau and closer to such prophets as Ann Lee, John Humphrey Noyes, and Joseph Smith, who all founded utopian communities built around alternative religious and sexual norms in the mid-nineteenth century. The "complex marriage" practices of Noyes's Oneida Community and the Mormon endorsement of polygamy offer direct parallels to Wendell's domestic philosophy.¹⁰ But they also play a central role in the creation of historical conditions that severely limit his ability to practice it.

Thus, in an 1879 ruling on Mormon-initiated test case, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed polygamy, arguing that monogamy stood as "the very foundation of the democratic state." The Oneida Community gave up the practice of complex marriage in the same year. The Mormon response was less compliant, and female reformers initiated a vigorous, nationwide antipolygamy crusade in the wake of the Court's ruling. The fruit of this crusade was the passage of laws that opened the way for systematic federal intervention in Mormon private life. In 1890, the Mormon Church withdrew its endorsement of plural marriage, conceding defeat in its battle for the legal right to promote alternative norms of sexual and domestic conduct.¹¹

This historical context lends urgency and poignancy to Wendell's conversation with Sophia about his practice of polygamy, undertaken in the very years when lawmakers and reformers aggressively organized against it. Sophia notes, "It is very advanced, very old, and very nice, perhaps … but we must keep it from the public, at all costs." In his reply, he wonders, "[W]ho is to eat me? The authorities of the state and the wiseacres of the nation?" (168-69). Wendell's principled refusal to conform his sexual practices to the dictates of monogamy makes him an enemy of the state. His only weapon of self-defense is obscurity, and this weapon is understandably hard to wield when his overarching ambition is to people the world anew. As Barnes's narrator reports. Wendell has "trouble in keeping [his] life out of the papers," and the mayor wants him in jail. Eventually, the law hunts him down in his own home. When a "delegation … headed by a social worker" arrives to inquire about his two wives, Wendell rightly predicts, "I am about to be infested with scrutiny" (213).

In the meantime, however, it is not Wendell's extra wife but his children's truancy that runs him afoul with the state. Where the social worker's visit spells doom for the Ryder philosophy, forcing one wife and her children out on the street. Wendell emerges as the victor in his encounter with the school authorities. Once again, this success is due to his skillful deployment of the narrative of a virgin's violation to discredit the charges lodged against him. Like his mother before him. Wendell forecloses the scandalization of his private life by threatening the public domain with scandal in kind. Like her, he does so by taking up reformist arguments of an earlier era in order to resist and condemn the leading reform agendas of the present-day.

Wendell's battle with the public school system occurs after a shift in its organization that parallels the shift reviewed above in the social benevolence movement. The common schooling movement began in the 1830s as a middle-class reform effort; however, it was only after 1890, when a quiet bureaucratic revolution took place, that adequate procedures were in place nationwide to enforce attendance laws and hold schools to a single standard. At the same juncture, different strands in the ideology of public education took on new strength as states secured their control of the system. This ideology has been variously interpreted. Some point to public education's role in creating an efficient and tractable workforce, others to its role in promoting religious piety and loyalty to the state (see Tyack and Gordon).

Wendell incorporates many of these points in a speech he delivers to an investigating school authority and a crowd of his neighbors after he is called to the town schoolhouse to account for his children's truancy. Rejecting the ideological aims of the latest wave of educational reform, he reaches back to the ideas of an earlier reformer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to defend his own position. In "Self-Reliance." Emerson grows impatient with a system of education built upon the principle of imitation rather than originality. "Every great man is a unique," he insists; "Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare" (279). Similarly, Wendell condemns the school authorities for "trying to make scrub-oak of my sons' trees" through an uninspired curriculum devoted to rote memorization of religious and state propaganda. He complains, "The Board of Education" would have children memorize "dates and speeches, half forgotten, of dead statesmen," and learn to "render Hamlet backward, and the Commandments sideways." And he defends his children's truancy on the grounds that it offers them "[i]mmunity … from the common and accepted conditions of life, as taught in the parochial schools" (130-31).

Yet it is the beauty of the investigating official's self-sought mediocrity that such arguments are "Greek and a tomb to him"; any success that Wendell might hope to have in this encounter must be sought on other ground. The school's case against the Ryders, on the other hand, is simple and predictable. The investigating official informs Wendell that "there are laws in this country, and one of them is that children must attend school." And he contends that children who don't go to school "will grow up … deflowering women, and defaming God" (130). With this latter charge, virginal violation comes to stand for the more general threat of social havoc posed by children whose upbringing is not supervised by the state. In his reply, Wendell adroitly takes up the same figure and uses it to represent a moral threat which the state itself poses to the children it ostensibly guides and protects.

In making his second critique, Wendell concedes the need to send his children to school for the new leverage it allows him as a concerned parent. "[I]f you insist," he tells his interlocutor, "I, being but a humble citizen, can but submit, but I may warn you that Ryder as an outlaw is less trouble than citizen Ryder" (131). He goes on to play the part of a good citizen scandalized by the hidden pockets of corruption he finds on state property. He first focuses attention on the school drinking well, whose common cup communicates the taint of "three rats and one cat" festering in its depths (132). He then turns to the school privy: "its double-seated grandeur two black pits, the wood carved over with hearts and arrows, and successive generations' initials twined therein." Positioned in front of the schoolhouse's only window, the "gaped, doorless" structure of the privy offers its graffiti as a rival scene of instruction to the black-board within (129).

In his new role as public watchdog. Wendell reveals the school's pure well of knowledge to be an "abyss of disease and filth." And he indignantly refuses to "permit my daughter to learn of love as it is written on yonder privy ring" (132). With the latter remark, Wendell conjures up the image of a young girl violated by lessons in love learned with her pants down in a public privy in order to expose an ineradicable moral threat emanating from the public domain. The Emersonian complaint originally lodged against the school's blackboard curriculum—that it will infect his children with "the common and accepted conditions of life"—reemerges as mock outrage against the degrading commonness and defiling vulgarity of the privy's adjoining pedagogy. Wendell here reveals the public school system as the propagator of the very kind of common viciousness that it was designed to reform. In doing so, he draws public attention to scandalous instances of neglect and hypocrisy on the part of the school authorities. But he also points to a more deepseated eagerness on the part of the state-educated public to constitute itself as a public by reading and writing about the very activities it would forbid him to practice in private.

Faced with these disclosures, the crowd rushes forward to attack the school official. In the ensuing tumult of righteous indignation, Wendell makes a quiet escape, resuming the role of outlaw which his unexpected success in the role of citizen newly affords him. The next time the law catches up with him, however, he is not so lucky. In a midnight conference with his mother held shortly after the social worker's visit, he decides to ask Amelia, his legitimate wife, to leave with her five children so that he might bring his marriage practices in line with federal law. Unsurprisingly—for she has always been "good and dependable"—she agrees (241).

It is at this point in the plot that Barnes's disillusionment with the whole project of middle-class reformism becomes most clear. In a late interview, Barnes comments disparagingly on Wendell: "Ryder is one of those impossible people who are going to save the world—how can anyone save the world?" (qtd. in Field 185).¹² Wendell and Sophia offer to save the world from the dubious salvation foisted upon it by a reform-minded state and corporate bureaucracy. For most of the novel, they successfully resist and expose the hypocrisy and self-interest underwriting their opponents' ostensibly altruistic devotion to the public good. But in the last pages of the novel, they too succumb to new depths of hypocrisy and self-interest, sacrificing family for the sake of family. As far as Amelia and her children are concerned, Wendell, Sophia, and the state finally appear as identical dispensers of ruin. In the Ryders' ultimate complicity with the social worker's delegation, Barnes points up the continuity between the mid-nineteenth-century models of reform that the Ryders embrace and the turn-of-the-century reform measures that they would ostensibly use such models to overcome or defy.

Julie's Share

In their brutal bargain with the social worker, Wendell and Sophia abandon their own policy of principled resistance to the state. They also seem to close off possibilities of successful resistance for Amelia and her children. But in fact this foreclosure begins much earlier, when Wendell and Sophia appoint themselves to act as the family's sole representatives in the public sphere. In the last section of the essay, I want to turn attention to two characters who are particularly ill-served by this arrangement: Amelia herself, the good wife who gets thrown out on the street, and her daughter Julie, namelessly invoked in her father's debate with the school authorities. They too bear potentially scandalous secrets that gain representation through narratives of a virgin's violation. Yet they fail to deploy these secrets, even momentarily, as a means of personal gain or political protest. Cut off almost entirely from the outside world, they lack the free passage across the public/private divide on which scandal depends. Consequently, their secrets fail to empower them, but instead enforce and deepen their initial lack of power.

Hemmed in by the "magnificen[ce]" of Sophia's nothing and Wendell's all (9, 168), the remaining women in the Ryder household command a share of the family's greatness only insofar as they grow great with child. The illegitimate wife, Kate-Careless, a lusty and affable woman, finds the terms of such a bargain to her taste. "I've become infatuated with the flavour of motherhood," she tells Wendell; "you poked it under my nose, and I've learned to like it" (170). But Amelia and Julie never learn to like it, which may be why the pregnancies they bear in the novel are both, in some sense, false. These pregnancies also serve as vehicles for muffled protest, providing the occasion and the terms through which each woman attempts to speak the secret of her own resistance. At the time of Amelia's lying-in, she is convinced she will die and warns Julie never to "let a man touch you, for their touching never ends, and screaming oneself into a mother is no pleasure at all" (95). When the baby is born, Wendell cries out, "The babe is black!" But the transvestite midwife, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, assures him, "Bile alone is father of its colour" (97).

The scandalous possibility that Amelia has taken a black man as her lover, though quickly invalidated by O'Connor, returns in the next chapter. There, Amelia dreams of a virgin's averted violation. In her dream, she stands at the key-hole before an ornate chamber lined with the trophies of Western culture. Inside the chamber, a black ox approaches the bed of a white woman, asking that he be given "a place in your Savior." She refuses, saying "Go away and do not try to defile me, for I have time in which to think, but you must labour." The ox replies that her God "will damn himself in me," but when he kneels before Christ's crucifix at the end of the dream, he says simply, "Remember the woman" (99).

This dream of averted violation, like most dreams, gives representation to a contradictory assortment of hidden wishes. And it borrows two preexisting cultural scripts, both associated with the caused of racial reform, in order to do so. Thus, the narrator initially aligns Amelia's dream with the Christian and sentimental discourse of the antebellum abolitionist movement, glossing the dream as an attempt to "set a mighty wrong to rights, to get the black man the attention of the Lord, and a place in his mercies" (98). Yet the text of the dream, with its transparent allusion to the threat of miscegenation, exposes the limits of white abolitionists' merciful love for black slaves. Indeed, in its recourse to images of black defilement, the dream is more readily aligned with the racist discourse of white supremacy which flared up violently during and after Reconstruction. Linking the imminent fall of Western civilization to black men's bestial lust for white women, Amelia's dream reproduces the major contemporary script used to revoke the fragile political, social, and economic gains which blacks had accrued since the Civil War.¹³

Why does Amelia have such a dream at such a juncture? What does the plight of the black man have to do with her fear of childbirth or her aversion to her husband's touch? Matthew O'Connor's comment that "bile alone is father" of the baby's color provides a place to begin. O'Connor's diagnosis refers back to the medieval theory of the four humors, in which bile denotes irascibility, gloominess, and ill humor. In this sense, Amelia's black baby grotesquely embodies and renders visible its mother's "bilious" unhappiness within her marriage. In the overdetermined and contradictory logic of the dream's imagery, this unhappiness takes further form as a fantasy of protesting against the injustice of her fate through sexual and political union with a black man. At the same time, however, Amelia's dream calls upon the racist script of a pure white woman resisting defilement by a black beast to condemn and punish her own husband's amorous advances. In the figure of the black ox at the bedside, the black man's mythical offense—interracial rape—and his exacted punishment—castration—find simultaneous representation.¹⁴ Once again, the narrator suggests that this ready-made cultural script serves as a cover for protests more properly lodged elsewhere; the dream represents "an effort to retake Wendell," king of the yard at Bulls'-Ease, "in his own colours" (98).

In the two explanations of her baby's color, Amelia finds a way to connect her individual anger and suffering with the group anger and suffering of African-Americans. But the contradictions in the dream that follows (born of the black ox's double status as wronged victim and punished sexual aggressor) lead her to reject the very alliance which gives voice to her own resistance. Through the body of her newborn child, Amelia's bilious anger at her lot takes on the sign of miscegenation, while her dream's adherence to the taboo against miscegenation signals her unwillingness to acknowledge and act upon that anger. Her baby's dark coloring invokes the historic suffering of blacks to make the secret of her marital suffering scandalously visible; but her subsequent dream of a virgin's averted violation refuses the potential union between black grievances and her own.

The text of Amelia's dream, like the texts of Sophia's encounter with the magnate and Wendell's encounter with the school official, stages a confrontation between old and new scripts of social reform. But the external, interpersonal conflicts dramatized in those episodes reappear in Amelia's dream as an internal conflict waged over the very question of whether or not she will speak out in protest on her own behalf. Ironically, it is precisely the virgin's successful resistance to violation in the dream's narrative which comes to represent Amelia's self-defeating resolve to keep quiet. Appropriating and conflating central tropes drawn from competing discourses of racial (or racist) reform, Amelia's dream ultimately betrays its own aim to "set a mighty wrong to rights." Fittingly, the dream occurs in a self-contained chapter. Amelia, a country-girl "well rounded in restrictions," reports its contents to no one (98).

Julie is less willing to remain silent on her mother's account. At one point, she lashes out against Kate-Careless who manifests the "disease … emanating directly from her father" "to the torment of her mother" (143). But when Julie gives representation to her own torment, she, like Amelia, resorts to a false pregnancy and a grotesquely deformed sentimental dream. As such a parallel would suggest, her protest has no great effect on her position within the Ryder household. In Chapter 24, "Julie Becomes What She Had Read" (106). Schooled at home on the literary diet of Sophia's youth, she dreams of tiny Arabella Lynn: another beautiful Little Eva dying a sentimental death, but with a grotesquely exaggerated bad conscience because she has doubted the existence of God. By the end of the dream, Arabella joins a parade of pregnant "little girls" as they fall through the sky. Julie then wakes to find Sophia protecting her from Wendell's blows as he bitterly rejects her, crying, "she is none of mine. Did I not hear her deriding me greatly?" (109-10).

Anne Dalton's feminist-psychoanalytic reading of Julie's dream plausibly establishes it as an encoded incest narrative. But the larger claims of her argument cannot be derived from a reading of the dream-text alone, depending instead on a projected second narrative (to which, she claims, Barnes herself may or may not have had conscious access) concerning Barnes's own father's sexually abusive treatment of her. Dalton's argument includes an account of why incest narratives are encoded in the first place, and what social and moral obligations fall to the literary critic in the face of such encoding. She contends that the "metaphorical descriptions of father-daughter incest" in Julie's dream reflect the pressures of psychic and social censorship; unable to accuse her father directly, Barnes resorts to fiction and to figuration to convey her traumatic life story. The responsible critic must read past the dream-text's figures to uncover and condemn the "real" acts of violation (to Julie and to Barnes herself) that lie behind them. Anything less, according to Dalton, serves "to perpetuate the silencing of those who have suffered from child abuse" ("Escaping" 167-68).

If we accept the terms of Dalton's argument, we might read Julie's dream as the final secret which the text presents, one which lends its narrative to all the other secrets in the novel. Yet Julie's secret, like her mother's, has been forcibly displaced from the social border between secrecy and scandal to the psychic border between fantasy and fact. We might thus understand Julie's anger as the anger of a young girl with a secret she cannot publish. Julie lives in a house papered over with literary and newspaper images of incest and rape (14). But where her grandmother Sophia can silently rely on newspaper clippings of "the pretty girl untimely raped" to guard her skirts during her encounter with Boots in the public domain,¹⁵ such a clipping provides Julie with no protection in the private domain of her family. Julie's experience, like her mother's troubles the otherwise very gratifying fantasy of unregulated middle-class privacy which Wendell and Sophia fight to defend. The pain of these two women reminds us that privacy is never a reliable privilege for those who lack firm access to a public voice and a public hearing.

But as soon as we get this far in such a line of argument, problems arise. Dalton assumes that the critic can (indeed must) supply what Julie lacks in the text itself. She offers a reading that speaks out publicly on behalf of the abused child and on behalf of the facts, and she "corrects … misreadings and 'nonreadings'" by earlier critics which have failed to do likewise ("Escaping" 168). In effect, she rescues Barnes's novel from both its silences and its silencers. In Dalton's reading, the interpretive strategies of the literary critic fuse with the self-authorizing strategies of the social reformer: the appeal to fact, the exposure of secrets, the declared devotion to another's welfare, and the self-appointed mission of correction equally characterize both enterprises. Yet Ryder itself meticulously examines these discursive strategies and the reformist agendas they legitimate, only to reject them.

Dalton's act of reading uncovers evidence that "incriminate[s]" Wendell Ryder (or Wald Barnes) as a child molester ("Escaping" 165). Within the novel itself, however, Wendell's and his mother's own acts of reading incriminate social reformers for interventions in family life which shore up the coercive and exploitative power of the wage economy, heterosexual monogamy, and the welfare state. The novel does not lend itself to stable oppositions between criminal projects and projects of correction. Indeed, it repeatedly foregrounds the morally suspect and historically variable nature of that very distinction.

Moreover, two episodes in the novel openly question how well justice is served by the combined forces of scandalous publicity and moral reformism in cases of alleged sexual misconduct. As we have seen, Ryder uses the dream-text of Julie's mother, Amelia, to dramatize a dangerous readiness to cast the black man, sooner than the white, as the offending "bull" in the rape scenarios of the nation's cultural imagination. The only other "bull" to be publicly condemned for a sexual crime in the novel is Oscar Wilde, tried and imprisoned on charges of sodomy. In the same conversation with his mother in which she reiterates the need to keep his polygamous practices secret, Wendell remembers seeing Wilde in London after

[t]he scandal had burst, and though he was the core, the fragrant centre of a rousing stench, in a month he was a changed man, not changing, sitting within his cell, weeping, writhing, plotting 'De Profundis,'… a bull caught and captured, sentenced, hamstrung, marauded, peered at, peeped upon, regarded and discovered to be a gentle sobbing cow. (166)

For Barnes, who dedicated Ryder to "T. W." in cloaked tribute to her lesbian lover Thelma Wood, the memory of Wilde's fate and its testimony to the quality of justice served in the name of guarding sexual innocence, was likely to have been quite chilling.

The extent to which Barnes distrusted the efficacy of public exposure as a tool for justice in cases of sexual misconduct is further suggested by an anecdote she reported to Hank O'Neal in her old age. Between the time she left her parents' farm and the time she wrote Ryder, Barnes herself had a successful career in sensationalist journalism. According to O'Neal,

She finally quit the papers because of a rape case in which a girl in her teens had been raped six times. The editor of the Journal American wanted an interview with the victim and suggested that Miss Barnes contrive a story to gain access to the girl. She managed to sneak past the guards at the hospital, entered the girl's room, made up some wild tale, and got an interview, but when it was over felt guilty about what she had done. When she told her editor she would never cover another rape case and would not write a story about this one or give the information to anyone else, he fired her on the spot. (52)

In this anecdote, Barnes narrates a moment of protracted and painful decision in which she finally chooses to perpetuate the silence of a victim of sexual abuse rather than publish the facts on her behalf (and against her will). At this moment, she seems to expose and refuse the suspect nature of her own moral, political, and/or economic investment in the reformist potential of scandalous publicity. Of course, until the anecdote is repeated, such an exposure carries little critical force for anyone other than Barnes herself since it finds its medium in silence. Yet we might use the grim choice of total silence with which Barnes marked her departure from investigative journalism better to measure what she achieves through the porous silences, the paraded secrets, which distinguish the investigative forays of her fiction.

In Ryder's narratives of a virgin's violation, Barnes creates a third alternative to the limiting choice of total silence or full factual disclosure presented in her anecdote to O'Neal. It is important, I believe, to examine this alternative for what it achieves in its own right, rather than reading it as a product of compromise or failure, an index of the debilitating effects of social and psychic censorship. For Ryder calls into question the assumption that full factual disclosure is the best (because most therapeutic, most politically progressive) way to narrate a story of sexual violation. One can argue further that the figural and fictive deployment of the narrative of violation provides Barnes with the means for commenting critically on this very assumption.

In keeping secret the exact nature of Julie's relationship to the novel's proliferating narratives of a virgin's violation, Barnes refuses to disclose a "real" originary event to which the figural play of her text might be referred and through which it might be contained. Lodging formal accusations against no single attacker on Julie's behalf, Ryder conducts no trial and brings no guilty party to justice. But by the same token the novel resists the sensationalist impulse to confine the sources of social horror to the supernaturally corrosive effects of isolated agents whose practices fail to conform to the current dictates of normality.

Barnes pays a price, both for her refusal to moor Julie's dream of protest in a verifiable scene of wrongdoing, and for her wider refusal to ground her protest novel in a coherent and circumscribed set of social and political grievances. Withholding final judgment on where blame is to be laid—and for what—her novel cannot lend the weight of its critique to a specific program of change. But this is only to say that Barnes writes her protest novel to lambast, rather than serve, the cause of social reform. Indeed, the very impossibility of pinning down a "real" crime of incest or rape against Julie in Ryder makes possible a metaphorical widening of the field of suspects and of crimes in the recurring dream-scene of her violation. Barnes makes repeated, figurative use of the narrative of a virgin's violation to foreground the ultimate complicity between middle-class reformers and the structures of oppression they would reform, while eschewing the scandalous appeal to fact on which such projects depend. Instead, she promotes figure over fact to implicate society at large in a scandal that cannot be localized.

notes

1. For related discussions, of Ryder and Nightwood respectively, see J. Scott and Marcus.

2. See Dalton, "Escaping." For related discussions of the incest theme in Barnes's other works, see Broe, "Art"; Curry; Dalton, "This"; and DeSalvo, "Make" and Conceived, ch. 4. For the leading biographical evaluation of Barnes's abusive sexual history (whose details, in key areas, are still uncertain and/or disputed), see Herring, Djuna 53-64, 268-71.

3. In justification of his decision, Herring cites Barnes's own comment to "James Scott and others that her novel Ryder was completely autobiographical" (313-14 n2).

4. See Dalton, "Escaping." For an earlier reading of Julie's dream which hints at the possibility of Wendell's abuse, see Ponsot.

5. For an account of the reform efforts which Barnes's grandmother supported through her journalism, see Herring, "Zadel" 108, 111.

6. Thus, a leading philanthropic reformer, Josephine Shaw Lowell, declared that society should "refuse to support any except those whom it can control." Her colleague S. Humphreys Gurteen concurred, declaring that the "fundamental law" of charity organization "is expressed in one word: INVESTIGATE." See Boyer 145-49 and Ginzberg 189-93, 197-200.

7. In a 1915 interview with Mother Jones, Barnes reports the famous labor activist's low opinion of postbellum philanthropy: "It's relief work made possible through slavery, it's charity through chains. It's a rotten system, kept up by your high-class robbers." See Barnes Interviews 102, Barnes's grandmother also criticized the "narrow charity" of this period in print. In an 1873 piece for Harper's she contrasts the sentimental ideal of "love-ruled, intelligently regulated homes" for the urban poor to the black contemporary landscape of "almshouses, prisons," "asylums" and "hospitals." See Buddington 239.

8. Sophia pays tribute to the power of the press on the walls of her writing room back home, which are "covered over," like her petticoated body, with a thick layer of images. The uppermost layer consists of "clippings from newspapers" and includes the photo of a "pretty girl untimely raped" (13-14).

9. These citations are drawn from "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," and "Circles."

10. For an account of these religious communities, see Foster. For biographical material linking Wald Barnes to the Mormons, see Herring, Djuna 31-32.

11. See Clayton 51; Iverson 126-27; and Lyman 22-26, 124-43.

12. Field goes on to note Barnes's declaration that the break-up of the family through state intervention was the one part of her novel she made up (185). This adjustment to her family history further underlines Barnes's distrust of reformist efforts to save the world.

13. Fredrickson links the Increasing prevalence of the construct of "the Negro as beast" to "the ideology of extreme racism that … engulf[ed] the South after 1890" (256, 262).

14. As B. Scott notes, the dream ox is a castrated bull (111). For an analysis of the frequent recourse to castration in the lynching of black men, see Wiegman. For a complementary historical account, see Hodes.

15. See my footnote 8.

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